Scene XI
Finale
Watch this performance
Featured
Maria Callas · "Casta Diva" from Bellini's Norma
The defining bel canto aria, sung by the defining 20th-century soprano. Paris, 1958.
Four hundred years of voice as drama and drama as voice — from Monteverdi's Florence to the Met stage tonight.
Florence, the 1570s. A group of intellectuals — the Camerata fiorentina, meeting at the home of Count Giovanni de' Bardi — try to reconstruct ancient Greek drama, which they (correctly) believe was sung throughout.
The experiments produce Dafne by Jacopo Peri (1597, music mostly lost) and Euridice (1600), the first opera whose music survives in full. Then Claudio Monteverdi — already a court composer in Mantua and a master of the polyphonic madrigal — writes L'Orfeo (1607) for the Mantuan court of the Gonzagas. Five acts, a 38-piece orchestra, recitative and aria, a toccata fanfare for opening, a final ballet. The first opera that is unambiguously a masterpiece. By 1637 the world's first public opera house — the Teatro San Cassiano — opens in Venice. By 1700 there are more than a dozen public houses in the city. Opera is born as a public art.
Handel arrives in London in 1710 and dominates Italian opera there for thirty years. Rinaldo (1711), Giulio Cesare (1724), Rodelinda (1725) — heroic seria operas built on the da capo aria (A–B–A with ornamented return) and starring castrati. By the 1730s English audiences tire of Italian opera and Handel turns to oratorio (Messiah, 1741).
Across Europe other styles: French tragédie en musique (Lully, then Rameau); the German Singspiel (Mozart's Magic Flute); the English ballad opera (The Beggar's Opera, 1728). Then, in the 1810s–40s, the Italian bel canto period — Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti — emphasizing vocal line, agility, and ornamentation. Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816). Bellini's Norma (1831). Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), with its mad scene that defined a genre for the next century.
Three operas to one librettist (Lorenzo Da Ponte) form opera's eternal core: Le nozze di Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), Così fan tutte (1790). They are comedies that contain tragedy, social critique, and the deepest characterization in the form to that point. The Countess in Figaro's aria "Dove sono" — a woman lamenting her husband's infidelity — is a study in psychological depth that Verdi would still be learning from a century later.
Mozart's last opera, Die Zauberflöte (1791), is a Singspiel (German with spoken dialogue) that mixes folk tunes, Masonic ritual, fairy tale, and the Queen of the Night's "Der Hölle Rache" (one of opera's signature high-F peaks).
Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) writes 26 operas across 54 years. The middle-period trilogy — Rigoletto (1851), Il trovatore (1853), La traviata (1853) — places him at the center of Italian musical life. Aida (1871) was commissioned for the new Cairo Opera House. The late Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893), both with libretti by Arrigo Boito after Shakespeare, are Verdi at his most harmonically advanced and dramatically supple.
Sempre libera degg'io
folleggiare di gioia in gioia,
vo' che scorra il viver mio
pei sentieri del piacer.
Richard Wagner (1813–1883) — exact contemporary of Verdi — pushes the form in a different direction. He writes his own libretti, calls his works "music dramas" (not operas), eliminates closed numbers, develops the technique of leitmotif (recurring orchestral figures associated with characters, objects, ideas). The four-opera Der Ring des Nibelungen (Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung, 1869–1876) takes 26 years to compose and ~15 hours to perform.
To stage it, Wagner builds his own opera house: the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, opened 1876, with a covered orchestra pit and steeply raked seating. Tristan und Isolde (1865) — the opening "Tristan chord" is often cited as the moment functional tonality begins to dissolve. Parsifal (1882). The Ring is performed at Bayreuth every summer, in the same theater Wagner built, by the same family that runs it.
The end of the 19th century brings verismo — operas about ordinary contemporary people in plausible situations, often violent. Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana (1890) and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci (1892) — usually performed together as "Cav and Pag" — are the founding texts. Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) brings the style to its commercial summit: La bohème (1896), Tosca (1900), Madama Butterfly (1904), the unfinished Turandot (1926). Puccini's gift for melody and theatrical pacing has kept his operas at the top of every house's repertoire for over a century.
Strauss's Salome (1905) and Elektra (1909) — both with Hofmannsthal libretti — push post-Wagnerian harmony to atonality. Berg's Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (unfinished, 1937) apply Schoenbergian language to opera. Britten — Peter Grimes (1945), The Turn of the Screw (1954), Death in Venice (1973) — recovers tonality for the medium with a uniquely English flavor.
Late-century Americans: Glass's Einstein on the Beach (1976), Adams's Nixon in China (1987) and The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), Bernstein's Candide (1956). Living composers: Saariaho (L'Amour de loin, 2000), Adès (The Tempest, 2004; The Exterminating Angel, 2016), Missy Mazzoli, Kaija Saariaho, Jeanine Tesori.
The leading-lady voice. Sub-categories: coloratura (agile, high — Queen of the Night), lyric (Mimì in Bohème), spinto (Tosca), dramatic (Brünnhilde, Isolde).
Carmen, Octavian, Cherubino. Often "trouser roles" (women playing young men).
Rare. Erda in the Ring; the Witch in Hänsel und Gretel.
Used in Baroque opera (former castrato roles); also modern roles like Britten's Oberon.
The leading-man voice. Lyric (Rodolfo), spinto (Cavaradossi), dramatic (Otello), heldentenor (Tristan, Siegfried).
Father, villain, comic figure. Don Giovanni, Iago, Figaro the barber.
Authority and antiquity. Sarastro, Boris Godunov, the Commendatore.
The horseshoe-shaped Italian theater (La Scala, Milan, 1778; San Carlo, Naples, 1737) became the standard plan: a curved bank of tiered boxes facing a proscenium stage, with an orchestra pit between.
The great houses, surveyed: La Scala Milan (1778); Vienna State Opera (1869); Royal Opera House Covent Garden (1858); Metropolitan Opera New York (current Lincoln Center building 1966); Opéra Garnier Paris (1875) and Opéra Bastille (1989); Bayreuth Festspielhaus (1876, Wagner only); Sydney Opera House (1973).
The defining bel canto aria, sung by the defining 20th-century soprano. Paris, 1958.